


Heartbeaten

by wreathed



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguity, Character Study, Ficlet, Incest, M/M, No Dialogue, Seduction, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:16:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of bodies and of minds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heartbeaten

The brain is what counts. Everything else is transport.

Sherlock is not interested in bodies, but in minds.

*

For Sherlock, sex is the last resort weapon: far behind the pocket magnifier, the riding crop and the handgun. With ease, he compliments Molly to get her to wheel back out a body, but it is rare that Sherlock has to stoop to something so low and crude as getting down on his knees.

Just as Molly is taken in by his flirtation, just as grieving widows believe his sobbing over their lost husbands, Sherlock can seduce people if he needs to. He watches his target, finds out what they want, and pretends to become it. It offers him little enjoyment beyond its contribution towards solving the case.

Even careful individuals are lax with information around a lover. Stupid, stupid. Just because they’ve given away their bodies, they give away their minds as well.

*

There are very few minds good enough to warrant his full and sustained attention.

The serial killers he’s defeated, he’s found out all their secrets, and once they’ve hanged themselves or put themselves in prison there’s little more to consider anyway.

Moriarty could be good at all kinds of games, Sherlock thinks, if he ceased his pesky habits of keeping his whereabouts unknown and threatening to kill him. Shame their meetings are so rare.

John is a friend. John is rarely boring. But Sherlock knows he’ll never have to try and seduce John to understand him. To find something out about John, all Sherlock needs to do is ask.

*

Mycroft. He has known Mycroft for his whole life, and is yet to entirely work him out.

*

Figuratively speaking, it is in blood one’s familial connections lie. Blood relatives. Blood ties. Your own flesh and blood.

Figuratively speaking, love is a matter of the heart.

Sherlock does not care for figurative explanations. Holmes DNA is in every cell of his and his brother’s body beyond those pumped through veins, and the cessation of a heartbeat is a sign not of emotions in ruin but of cardiac arrest.

*

One problem is that Sherlock does not quite know how he would seduce Mycroft. He does not know who Mycroft wants him to be, and even if he did, he cannot pretend to become someone else for someone who has known him from the day he was born.

*

Sinful thoughts come when understimulated; imagined scenarios while away the days. Yet however much it is his mind that desires, sex must eventually involve the body.

It is one thing for Sherlock to think the improbable: what Mycroft would be like, utterly undone under Sherlock and understanding at last. It is quite another to act out the impossible: to request to meet him, to slip a hand below his waistband, to get him to say yes.

Many think that what Sherlock can do is impossible, but all he does is notice things and think about them. A perfectly feasible feat.

Eventually, as ever, the solution is realised. They act like themselves, and do not pretend to feel guilty at all.

*

A second problem is that Sherlock did not need to seduce Mycroft. He wanted to.

*

Sherlock and Mycroft together is not something that is impossible.

Improbable.

But not impossible.

And so what remains must be the truth.


End file.
